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Quick Measures

The shy child that is Quick Measures has finally plucked up
the confidence to emerge into society from preview! The idea is that you
don't need now to create custom measures for the most common calculations that
you want to perform.

Using basic quick measures

For example, suppose you have these figures in a matrix:

Your sales in East Anglia (for overseas readers, this is a flat area in the East of England) are looking disappointing, but what percentage are they of total sales for each year?

You can see the answer to this by clicking on this drop arrow:

You can change the aggregation settings for the figure you're reporting on (in this case, the quantity of goods sold).

This allows you to choose to display sales as a percentage of the column total:

This basic measure has - I think - been available for some time.

This allows you to show that sales in East Anglia were every bit as bad as you
had feared:

Surely East Anglia has more than 4.47% of the population of the UK? Perhaps not ...

Advanced quick measures

Where things get interesting is if you choose to display a new quick measure:

Using the same drop arrow,
you can choose to create and display a new quick measure, although for
the example below I'll get to this point in a slightly different way.

For our example above, you might want to show sales in East Anglia (and other
regions, for that matter) as a percentage of sales in London, the all-consuming
capital of the UK:

Reassuringly, sales in London are exactly 100% of sales in London. The North-West and South-East regions actually have sales bigger than those in London.

Below is the outline for one way to show this matrix, using quick measures.

Power BI Desktop creates new measures using the DAX language. The jury
is still out on whether the introduction of quick measures means that most
people can avoid learning DAX.

First, right-click on the table containing the sales quantity, and choose to
create a quick measure:

Choose to create a new quick measure.

We'll create a measure to show total sales for the London region:

Choose
Filtered value to show sales for a specific region.

You can now drag fields onto the quick measure dialog box to create your
measure:

Here we're choosing to show
the total quantity of sales where the region name equals
London.

When you click on your measure in the field well ...

Click on the measure you've just created ...

... you'll see the corresponding DAX formula:

... to see the DAX formula which created it.

To complete the example, what you now need to do is to create another measure
manually:

This is the measure which you can then display in your matrix.

The problem is that even though adding a quick measure cleverly creates a DAX
formula on your behalf, you still need to understand the underlying process to
be able to use the quick measure effectively.